Digital Impact Factor: A Quality Index for Educational Blogs and Podcasts in Emergency Medicine and Critical Care

• Published in: Annals of emergency medicine 2023-07, Vol.82 (1), p.55-65
• Main Authors: Lin, Michelle, Phipps, Mina, Chan, Teresa M., Thoma, Brent, Nash, Christopher J., Yilmaz, Yusuf, Chen, David, He, Shuhan, Gisondi, Michael A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0196-0644; 1097-6760
• DOI: 10.1016/j.annemergmed.2023.02.011

Given the popularity of educational blogs and podcasts in medicine, learners and educators need tools to identify trusted and impactful sites. The Social Media Index was a multi-sourced formula to rank the effect of emergency medicine and critical care blogs. In 2022, a key data point for the Social Media Index became unavailable. This bibliometric study aimed to develop a new measure, the Digital Impact Factor, as a replacement. The Digital Impact Factor incorporated modern measures of website authority and reach. This formula was applied to a cross-sectional study of active emergency medicine and critical care blogs and podcasts. For each website, we generated a Digital Impact Factor score based on Ahrefs Domain Rating and the follower count of the websites’ pages from 8 social media platforms. A series of Spearman correlations provided evidence of association by comparing a rank-ordered list to rank lists derived from the Social Media Index over the last 5 years. The Bland-Altman analysis assessed for agreement. The authors identified 88 relevant websites with a median Ahrefs Domain Rating of 28 (range 0 to 71, maximum 100) and total social media followership count across 8 platforms of 1,828,557. The Domain Rating and individual social media followership scores were normalized based on the highest recorded values to yield the Digital Impact Factor (median 4.57; range 0.02 to 9.50, maximum 10). The correlation between the 2022 Digital Impact Factor and the 2021 Social Media Index was 0.94 (95% confidence interval 0.89 to 0.97; p